I'm no lawyer, but I'm advised that, for example, the UN Panel of Experts report by Yasmin Sooka and the other two lawyers has never been actually formally tabled at the UN Human Rights Commission. Certainly Ms. Sooka has said that any country could do that and then it will become a formal UN document, in the way that it doesn't have that status at the moment. So that would be something to look into. She certainly thinks that's possible.
There's a lot of frustration amongst diaspora Tamils at least about the reliance on the Geneva process, on the Human Rights Council there. After the immediate aftermath of the war, it congratulated Sri Lanka on its glorious victory against the terrorists. It has been a very slow and painful process moving forward. Even if one day it were to call for a commission of inquiry there still wouldn't be any punitive powers. I think probably the sensible route for victims who want redress is to go the route of individual prosecutions, using universal jurisdiction for torture.
Different countries in Europe have different rules about whether you need the victim or perpetrator to be a national in order to bring a case. I know that in some countries...in one country at least in Europe, the prosecutor's office has opened a case. There are British lawyers who have told me they are potentially willing to take on a case if I can find a victim who could identify a perpetrator. That's quite difficult because in the recent cases everyone's blindfolded. But it is possible theoretically to do that.
There might be a case of documenting a lot of these...taking testimonies and witness statements from people and figuring out, for example, patterns of abuse. If we know that there's a lot of rape and torture in a particular police station then you could potentially bring cases against the person who was in charge. We already know anecdotally there are several of them. But you'd really have to go with the pattern and the time period and a lot of allegations of rape and torture. At the moment there's no system to document it.